


this is my winter song to you

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, F/M, New Earth, Snow, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:15:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28333692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: He finishes the log cabin the day the first snow falls.
Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway
Comments: 22
Kudos: 127





	this is my winter song to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [victorias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/victorias/gifts).



> happy star trek D&D secret santa to victorias, Canada's #1 jc shipper!
> 
> lyrics taken from "winter song" by sara bareilles and ingrid michaelson, everyone please watch this enchanting video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkOKCWDJ4iA

**i. new earth**

_this is my winter song to you  
_ _the storm is coming soon  
_ _it rolls in from the sea_

 _my voice, a beacon in the night  
_ _my words will be your light  
_ _to carry you to me_

For Chakotay, words have always been the most difficult way to say something.

He has been trying to tell her how he feels, for a very long time. He has said it with his body, when he makes himself a wall between her and danger. He has said it with his eyes, a thousand different ways. He has said it with his presence, steady and reassuring, by her side.

But he was never sure if she heard him.

Now that they are here, alone on this planet - now that their entire existence has shrunk down to the size of two people in one room - it seems suddenly more urgent and more terrifying, the stakes for every interaction between them heightened. So he has tried to say it with his hands. Cooking, repairing, unpacking, building.

Massaging the knots out of her neck.

His words were easy, nonthreatening, an idle remark about his mother . . . but his hands spoke louder than his words, and for a moment, he is sure she heard him.

She must have, to be so discomfited. If the moment meant nothing, she would simply have gone to sleep.

But she didn't. She came back.

 _"Define parameters,"_ she had said.

Meaning, Tell _me what this is, between us._

_Put a label on this._

_Let me sort and categorize what I'm feeling, what you're feeling, so everything can be stored in its proper place where it will never get out of control._

So for the first time, he tried to tell her, finally, with words. Borrowed ones - he knows this is a little cowardly - but he does not have her quicksilver eloquence, and a story is the best that he can do.

For a moment, she had looked at him as though she understood - she had reached out her hand, letting her fingers interlace with his - and he exhaled in deep relief.

 _Finally,_ he had thought. _Finally, she knows._

But then she gently disentangled her hand and went to bed, and she did not speak of it the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that, and now after two months on New Earth the story of the angry warrior still hangs in the air between them, unresolved.

He feels raw and exposed around her now, like a layer of skin has been removed, leaving him more vulnerable to the elements. Everything is amplified, somehow. When she looks up from her work table and smiles at him. The sharp green scent of steam and forest which rises off her flushed skin when she comes in from the bath.

The new way she says his name.

On the ship, she had a thousand different ways to say it - sometimes an order, sometimes a reproach. Calling for help or seeking a solution to an unsolvable problem or warning of danger. There was always trust, but there was authority too. Rules. A command structure. She led, and he followed.

But here, there is no Starfleet, only two people trying to build a home, and his name is suddenly a warm, quiet thing in her mouth, intimate in a new and unexpected way. He has slowly grown accustomed to calling her Kathryn, as heady and reckless as it felt in the beginning; but she has always called him Chakotay, so her name for him has not changed. Only her voice has.

He wants it to mean something, but he isn't sure.

She is still enough his captain that he waits to follow her lead. And because she has not spoken of that night, neither does he.

* * * * *

To distract himself from that itchy, unsettling, raw-nerve feeling, he occupies himself with tasks which, by necessity, keep him apart from her most of the day. The first - which he can tell upsets her, though she does not dispute its logic - is to begin breaking down the emergency shuttlecraft for its very necessary parts. The fuel cells and electronics are more valuable to them than an escape plan they will never be able to use. Nine weeks have gone by, and the spacecraft can only reach warp 4. They would never catch up to the ship. Now, as before, their only real hope of escape is for Tuvok to return for them; and the more time passes, with Voyager inching closer to its goal of home day by day, the less likely that begins to seem.

She agrees to the plan, but he can tell that it costs her, and it breaks his heart a little.

But with the shuttlecraft disassembled into panels of metal and glass and wiring, another project begins to take form in his mind, and as she continues her daily study of the planet's flora and fauna, he quietly begins sketching plans and making notes.

The log cabin comes together more quickly than he anticipated, with the assistance of a phaser and the construction tools Tuvok sent down for them before the ship left. It is not large or particularly elaborate - one cozy, open room, in a little clearing behind their current shelter - but its walls are sturdy enough to withstand another plasma storm, he’s rather proud of the little stone fireplace, and - thanks to the glass panels reclaimed from the shuttlecraft viewports - it even has a window.

This will be her home. The prefabricated dwelling will suffice for him until he can complete a second cabin, adjoining this one. Perhaps with an open space between them, for evening bonfires in warm weather. He imagines slowly, year by year, collecting enough large stones to build the kind of massive outdoor oven the women in his family used to bake flatbreads. The design is simple enough, and they have nothing but time.

He can make this place beautiful for her.

He can make her happy, if she lets him.

It will never be Earth - it will never be the life she longed so deeply to return to - but he hopes it can be enough.

Among his people, work undertaken for the good of others is considered a blessed act. Surely, no matter how far they are from home, what was sacred in the Alpha Quadrant is sacred here too. So he pours all of himself into his labor, and what he cannot say in words, he says with his hands; every backache and bead of sweat and stubborn splinter are offerings to her, whether she recognizes them or not. He is in every stone laid carefully to form the open chimney. He is in the impeccably neat dovetail joists at each corner of the room, sealed tight against the weather. He is in the glassy-smooth milled timber of the floorboards, sanded with his own hands and then polished clean by phaser heat, and in the simple, clean lines of the furniture he builds out of leftover scraps of wood. Just a pair of low stools with a small round table, and a few plain shelves for her things; nothing terribly elaborate, and he plans to supplement it with a hodgepodge of other items taken from the shuttlecraft (he has given her the pilot's chair, for a more comfortable place to sit beside her small fireplace) and from the shelter, but it makes it look more like a home.

He is not sure what to do about her bed.

The prefabricated shelter has two built-in bunks - impossible to disassemble or transport, though the mattresses themselves are portable - with the headboards he added for both of them. But there is something in the notion of building a whole bed for her - of thinking to himself, every time he lays his hands on the wood, _you are touching the place where her body will lay_ \- which overwhelms him, and in the end he cannot bring himself to do it. She can lay her mattress and blankets in front of the hearth, where it will be warmest, until he can think of another solution.

He finishes the cabin the day the first flakes of snow begin to fall.

They appear to have landed here just on the cusp of the transition between seasons, the hot fierce plasma storms replaced by cooler weather, heavier clouds and longer nights. They wake up to faint dustings of frost sparkling over the leaves and grass around them, though it usually melts by midafternoon. The prefabricated shelter has thinner walls than the log cabin; Kathryn will be warmer in her new home.

The day the frost is replaced by real snow - snow which begins falling lightly in the morning, and continues throughout most of the day - he finally decides the cabin is ready to show her. When he traipses back into the shelter for lunch, shaking the chilly damp flakes off his boots, she is poring over Voyager's scans of the planet and looks up to greet him as he walks in the door.

"Do you know something," she says, “I think it’s the winter solstice tonight. Or whatever they would call it here, I suppose. A year here isn’t quite an Earth year; but we’re in the northern hemisphere, and it appears that we’ve reached the farthest tilt away from the planet’s sun.”

“Was that something you used to celebrate, back on Earth?” he asks, taking a protein bar and sitting down to join her. “The winter solstice?”

Kathryn laughs. “My interest in it was largely scientific, not cultural. We were very much a Christmas family. But of course on an uninhabited planet without an existing calendar, that’s a bit more difficult to track. If we count based on the number of days we’ve been away from the Alpha Quadrant, it’s probably something like . . . April? May?” She pauses, thoughtfully. “It’s funny,” she says. “It feels so much further away than it did before. Like our lives there were a kind of dream. Or a story that happened to someone else.”

“Less real,” Chakotay suggests. “Less real than this.”

Kathryn nods. “Less real than this,” she agrees quietly, and it seems as though perhaps she's saying something underneath those words, or inside them, but he isn't sure enough yet to press her.

She leads. He follows.

“Solstice and equinox festivals were considered rather old-fashioned traditions when I was growing up,” Chakotay says. “I remember my grandparents talking about them. But they were so tied to Earth history that as our people spread out across the galaxy, they developed seasonal traditions more specific to their own planets. A solar calendar operates very differently on a planet with two suns, for example.”

“They were old-fashioned on Earth, too,” laughs Kathryn. “I suppose I think of them as rather medieval, though they fell in and out of fashion over the centuries in many cultures. I never paid them much heed except as a sign that the days would start getting longer again. Winters in Bloomington could be quite intense."

"Hopefully, if we've already reached midwinter, that's a sign that they won't be too bad here," Chakotay offers. "Still, since this place belongs to us, and we can make whatever traditions we like - I think observing the solstices could be a pleasant thing to get used to. A way to mark the passage of time."

"Also an excuse to exchange gifts, I believe," says Kathryn, wryly. "But you already gave me a bathtub, so I'm willing to call that my gift in advance."

“As it happens,” he tells her, “I have something else for you too."

She raises an eyebrow. "Your mysterious building project, in the clearing behind the shelter? I know you're doing something with logs, I just don't know what."

"It's almost ready," he says. "But I want it to be a surprise."

She gives him a long look, intrigued and amused, before nodding. "I'll get out of your hair for the rest of the afternoon, then," she says agreeably. "I was going to walk back down to the lake to take some more soil samples before the snow gets much worse. I'll see you tonight, then."

"I'll see you tonight," he says. "Meet me there."

* * * * *

While she's gone, he moves her things into the cabin, makes a fire in the hearth to take off the chill, makes up a bed for her on the floor, finds a few hardy red flowers poking up out of the frozen ground and places them in a glass jar on the hand-carved table. They can still take their meals together in the shelter, and she might prefer to keep her work table there, but this can be the place she comes home to at the end of the day.

When Kathryn arrives, knocking at the rough-hewn door hanging neatly on hinges he welded himself, he opens it to her, heart in his throat, and waits to see if she will hear what he was trying to tell her with his hands all this time.

"Chakotay," she breathes in astonished wonder, taking it in with wide, stunned eyes. "This is extraordinary."

He watches in silence as she moves around the room, taking it in. When she runs light fingertips over the neatly-packed stones of the chimney, he feels the touch on his own skin. When she pauses to gaze out the long rectangular window which was once the shuttlecraft's viewport, smiling in delight at the view of the sun setting over snow-frosted woods, he feels like she is smiling at him. When she looks down at the tidily-arranged mattress, pillow and blankets in front of the fire, he knows that she feels the intimacy of it too . . . that he made her a home, a bed, with his own hands.

"I have a window," she says finally. "You took apart the shuttlecraft, so I could have a window."

He senses she's trying to articulate something more complicated than this, so he waits quietly, to see if she says more.

"I don't know how you do it," she murmurs. "How you saw such possibility in this place, long before I did. You took something that could have felt like exile - like a death sentence - and you turned it into something beautiful. You’ve given me so much, Chakotay. Not just the cooking, or the bathtub. Or even _this,”_ she adds, gesturing expansively to take in the cabin. “But the way you’ve shown me a picture of what our life could look like. A life that could actually be . . . happy.”

“I believe it could be,” he says, taking a step closer to her. “I believe we could be happy here.”

She smiles at him. "I've always admired that about you. You're adaptable. If our positions were reversed, if your ship had taken on my crew, I don't know that I would have adjusted as seamlessly to Maquis life as you did to Starfleet."

He raises an eyebrow. "It was hardly a seamless adjustment," he reminds her, which makes her laugh.

"Still. I think I'm just . . . well, too stubborn, I suppose. I didn’t understand you, at first. You seemed so ready to put down roots in this place, to make the best of it. And I resisted you at every turn. I didn’t want to lose the person I was. I didn’t want to let go of our crew, our family, our mission. To give up the dream of ever returning to the lives we left behind. I was a little envious, I think, of how much easier it was for you.”

"Kathryn," he says, impatience tugging at the edges of his voice, _"you know why that is."_

Something in his voice causes her to look at him sharply, puzzled and the faintest bit . . . alarmed?

"If I'd been stranded here alone," he tells her, "or with someone else - if it was Tuvok instead, or B'Elanna - it _would_ have felt like a death sentence. I wouldn't be wasting a single minute building headboards or log cabins or bathtubs, I'll tell you that much, and I sure as hell wouldn't have dismantled the shuttlecraft. I would have done everything you did. It would have been me, out there in the plasma storm, trying to salvage the broken insect traps. Without anywhere near the success, because I'm not half the scientist you are, but I would have been out there every minute of every day hunting for a cure anyway, refusing to give up. I would never have stopped,” he murmurs, taking a step closer to her, “fighting like hell to get back to you.”

“Chakotay,” she says softly, but he’s found his words now, and they’re pouring out of him.

“It’s because _you’re here,”_ he says insistently. “I’m home when I’m by your side, Kathryn. I don’t give a damn where we are. Voyager or the Alpha Quadrant or here in a log cabin. I meant what I said, even if I was . . . cowardly in the way I said it. I searched all my life for peace, for meaning, and I found it with you. And now that I have it, I don’t ever want to let it go.”

“We might very well spend the rest of our lives on this planet,” she reminds him gently. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” he says roughly, before he can stop himself, taking another step closer to her. Her eyes grow wide and startled, and he can see that her breathing has changed - deeper, more ragged. “You know what I want, Kathryn,” he says in a low voice. “You know how I feel. You’ve known for a long time. I said it to you, in the only way I could. And I’ve been waiting to see what you would do next.”

She lets out a long, ragged exhale, and moves away from him to pace closer to the window, her whole body one long sigh. He doesn't follow her, sensing she suddenly needs some space.

"It isn't so simple for me, Chakotay," she explains, a little helplessly. "There are . . . things to consider. If being on this planet, alone, together, changed the nature of our relationship in some fundamental way - if we said things to each other we couldn't take back, if we crossed lines we couldn't uncross - and then against all probability someday Voyager came back for us, and we had to return to the way things were before . . .”

“It would be complicated, yes,” he agrees.

Kathryn shakes her head. “No,” she says in a low, unhappy voice. “It would be _devastating.”_

Chakotay stares at her, feeling his pulse begin to accelerate in his veins.

_Devastating._

As though he matters to her so much that he has become a thing she could not bear to lose.

“My . . . ambivalence,” she goes on cautiously, looking more out the window than at him, “about our new life here - my reluctance to let go and embrace this place the way you did - it wasn’t just because I wasn’t ready yet to give up on Voyager, or returning to the Alpha Quadrant, or my life as a Starfleet captain. There were also . . . other factors to consider.”

“Like what?”

“Like whether I was ready to put down roots that might be uprooted later,” she confesses. “To let something grow, here on New Earth, which would be too painful to part with if we ever had to leave.” She gestures around her at cabin. “The intimacy of this,” she murmurs, “this world that belongs only to us . . . if I let myself get used to it, and then someday we have to go back to the relationship we had before? The Starfleet protocol, the rules and distance, the formality, I couldn’t . . .”

Her voice trails off as Chakotay crosses the cabin towards her in a few long strides. “Starfleet is _gone,”_ he reminds her in a low, intense voice. “That life is behind us. There’s no one here but you and me. If the answer is no, I can live with that. Just say it once, and I’ll never bring it up again. But if you do feel the way I feel - if there’s a chance for us to be happy here, together, but you won’t take the risk because maybe someday we might lose it - then you’re not the Kathryn Janeway I fell in love with at all.”

Both of them freeze once the word lands in the air between them, and it's hard to tell, at first, which of them is more astonished that he's finally said it out loud. He hadn’t meant to, not so bluntly as this, but he also isn’t sorry. It was already long past time, and he's exhausted by the thought of doing this dance with her forever. Never being certain where he stands, never knowing how close or how far she wants him, never knowing whether there could ever be the possibility of more.

It has to end here.

"You have to decide, Kathryn," he says quietly. "Tell me to stay, or tell me to go. I'll abide by whatever choice you make. But you have to be the one to say it."

"I can't give you orders anymore," she reminds him, which they both know isn't an answer.

"No. But you can tell me what you want." He closes the final few inches of distance between them, so close he can feel the swish of her skirts against his thigh, her breath on his skin. "Don't think about the future," he murmurs. "Don't think about the past. There's no one here except you and me. Right now, in this moment - what do you want?"

She doesn't answer him with words.

Instead, she reaches out to rest both her hands on his chest, and looks up at him with wide dark eyes, and that's all the _yes_ he needs. So he cradles her face in both his strong, callused hands, as his heart pounds in his chest like an ancient martial drum, and then finally, finally, he bends his head to kiss her.

Chakotay has imagined this moment more times than he would ever confess to another living soul, but he has never imagined it like this. Kathryn in a soft blue dress, eyes aglow with firelight, honey-golden hair tumbling loose around her shoulders, framed by a vast rectangular window where behind her, clouds and clouds of glittering white snow tumble down from the sky over dark green trees. At first he merely brushes her lips with his own, tentative, reverent, still a little dazed. But she clutches at his loose linen shirt in both hands and pulls him closer to her, letting his body press hers against the wall, as her mouth parts beneath his, and then suddenly it isn't just a kiss anymore. Everywhere on his body where Kathryn is touching him, his skin feels feverish, crackling with electricity. She tastes sweet and her lips are impossibly soft and she's kissing him back with such urgency that he finally understands this was never only happening to him.

"Kathryn," he breathes when they finally break apart. His eyes are closed, his forehead resting against hers. "Kathryn."

"You left off the end of the story," she says, reaching up to stroke his cheek with her gentle fingers. "The part of the ancient legend where the angry warrior teaches the woman how to find peace, too." Her thumb grazes his lower lip. "She was restless," Kathryn murmurs, "always moving from place to place. Always seeking. Never staying in one place too long, so nowhere ever really felt like home. Until one day, she and the angry warrior were separated from the rest of their people. Cut off from the world they knew, possibly for the rest of their lives. It was the woman's turn to be angry, after that. She had never learned stillness. She had no roots tying her to any particular place. But the angry warrior, who had found peace within himself, taught her that she could still find new worlds to explore even if she stayed on the ground. He showed her how they could build a life together."

"I could only tell you the first part of the story," Chakotay says softly. "It was always up to you how it ended."

"I've always liked, 'and they all lived happily ever after,'" says Kathryn. "An ancient legend from _my_ people."

A smile breaks over his face, like sunshine after storm clouds, and he thinks the swell of joy rising up inside his chest is more than his body can contain. "That's all I want," he murmurs, kissing her mouth again. "I just want to make you happy."

"You already have," she tells him. "You built a home for me. You've made this place beautiful. I feel _you_ in it, Chakotay. Every wood beam, every stone. Even if you weren't standing here beside me, I would feel you here." She reaches up to pull his mouth back down to hers. "The only thing wrong with this place," she murmurs, "is that you were going to leave me in it and then walk back through the woods and sleep in the freezing cold shelter, and then you'd be too far away."

"Too far away for what?" he asks, heart pounding.

"For everything. I sleep better when I can hear the sound of your breathing. I feel safer when you're close by. I don't like the idea of being so far away from you."

"I'll build a second cabin."

"I don't want a second cabin."

"Then you've really taken away all my good options for where to put my own bed, except in the middle of the woods."

Kathryn looks up at him, amused irritation flashing in her dark eyes. "You're going to make me say it, aren't you?"

"I'm going to make you say it, yes."

"Stay here, Chakotay," she says. "For the night. Forever. Stay with me. Be with me."

When he kisses her this time, it's with his whole body, and she's startled by the force of it, gasping with astonishment as his mouth swallows up her own, as his arms wrap around her back, holding her steady as they fumble awkwardly to kick off their boots. When her hands drop to his waist to unfasten his belt, he can feel his heart stop beating. Kathryn Janeway undressing him. He has never let his imagination run this far.

They sink down to the mattress by the fire, Kathryn on her back with his body blanketing hers, his hands stroking the creamy smooth skin revealed by her blue dress. Light fingertips up and down her forearm. Soft kisses against her collarbone. Her hands fumble through the loose folds of linen to slide beneath the billow of his now-untucked shirt, and he trembles at her touch against his skin.

They stay there for a long, long time. Neither of them are new at this, but neither of them have been with anyone in awhile, and they're hesitant, almost shy with each other. Rediscovering their own bodies after a long absence. Chakotay has forgotten how sensitive the wood-brown peaks of his nipples are until Kathryn's light fingertips skate over them and leave him gasping. Kathryn has forgotten how decadent it feels to have a pair of hands tangle in her long, loose hair. Somehow, slowly and clumsily, clothes make their way onto the floor in a heap, until there is nothing beneath the blanket on that mattress in front of the fire but skin against skin.

"I love you," Kathryn murmurs suddenly, as Chakotay lowers his head to kiss the graceful slope of her shoulder, and the words still him completely. "I didn't say it back, when you did. I've been a coward, too."

He doesn't look up at her.

"I'd given up all hope of ever hearing you say that," he says, his voice low and warm against her skin.

"I'm sorry I made you wait so long," she says. "In my defense, I didn't know."

"I'm glad you do now."

"I'm glad I'm here with you," she tells him, tracing idle fingertips up and down the notches of his spine. "If it was just you down here, or just me - if we were separated - we could have gone the rest of our lives and never had a chance to say it."

"I know this isn't the life you wanted," he says, bracing himself over her on his forearms so he can look down into her dark eyes. "But we can make it a good one, Kathryn. We can be happy here."

She smiles up at him. "I believe you," she says. "I know I didn't at first, but I do now."

He lowers his head to kiss her again, and she trembles as his hand drifts from her shoulder to her breasts, from her breasts to her belly, from her belly to the heat between her thighs, where he finds her so ready for him that his eyes go wide and he swallows, hard.

"Oh," he murmurs. "I wasn't sure - I didn't -"

Kathryn laughs at this, amused and affectionate and faintly teasing. "As always," she tells him, "you underestimate yourself."

He grins back at her. "I know the effect you have on me. It never occurred to me that I was having the same effect on you."

She raises a playful eyebrow. "What do you think I _do_ in that bathtub?"

Chakotay's whole body shudders at this, and she can feel the iron-hard cock pressed against her hip give a desperate, ravenous twitch, like a living thing. _"Fuck,"_ he groans hoarsely into her throat, a word she's absolutely never heard him say, and he's rewarded with a rush of heat and wetness against his fingers, still caressing her with impossible delicacy between her thighs.

Kathryn submerged in a tub of steaming water, hair bound up in a loose knot, stroking herself, making herself come, thinking of him.

He has been tempted, from time to time, to do the same - when he is alone in the woods, when thoughts of her overwhelm him - but he has resisted. It felt like a violation, somehow, like it would insult her if she knew. So he is carrying two months of pent-up desire and all the weight of the years before that, and the force of that restraint has reached its limit.

"Kathryn," he exhales her name into her skin, and she whispers a desperate "yes" back, and then in a heartbeat, he's inside her.

"Oh," she exclaims, as he enters her - slowly, gently at first, waiting to let her open up to him, to make sure this is still what she wants. "Oh God, Chakotay."

And now his name is something new in her mouth all over again. Now it's a word she says as she lifts her hips to take him in deeper, a word that means _"more,"_ a word that means _"kiss me again,"_ a word that means _"yes,"_ she suddenly has a hundred new ways to say it and he knows her so well he can immediately decipher them all.

It's so good. It shouldn't be this good. It's impossible that anything in all the world should feel like this. He shouldn't be thanking all his ancestors for the gift of an incurable plague leaving him stranded forever on an alien planet. But he is, because this is the purest moment of joy and pleasure he has ever known, and it can be his every night for the rest of his life.

This is what it took, to force them both to open themselves to love. They sacrificed so much to find it, but it's here now, and they'll never lose it.

Chakotay moves inside her with slow, purposeful, deliberate strokes, his eyes glowing down at her with fierce joy, savoring the hedonistic, erotic pleasure of seeing his captain disheveled and panting beneath him, her hair a honey-colored tangle spread across the mattress and the floor. Her arms tighten around his back, her soft cries growing sharper, and when he feels her come he's so overwhelmed that a shiver runs up and down his spine. He follows her over the edge not long after, releasing himself into her with a low, soft exhale, and then it is only stillness and breathing and the crackle of the fireplace beside them.

Outside, the snow falls in great, gusting drifts as the winter wind howls, on the longest and darkest night of the year; but inside, the two people gazing at each other on the thin Starfleet mattress on the hand-carved log floor have no thought for anything but each other.

 _This is perfect happiness,_ thinks Chakotay to himself, as he feels Kathryn's drowsy head sink against his chest, and holds her close as she eases into sleep in his arms. _And we will have it forever._

* * * * *

**four years later**

“They’ve come to treat the solstice as a kind of anniversary, albeit an informal one. They put their work on pause for a few nights - Kathryn leaving her science equipment in the shelter they now only use for work, and Chakotay halting whatever construction project he has recently adopted (this year, he has vowed, he will finally finish the outdoor oven) - and do nothing all day but lie in the massive, carved wooden bed he built for them, big enough for both of their mattresses side by side, tucked into the corner so they can curl up together and look out the window at the falling snow.

Chakotay is in the shelter, gathering up food and firewood and supplies, which means Kathryn is alone when the unimaginable happens.

She is in her nightdress, brushing her hair, making herself ready for him, when she hears a distant, faint static sound, coming from the shelf in the corner where they have stored all the personal belongings they brought with them.

Including their comm badges.

They have been silent for so long that Kathryn cannot place it right away, assuming the sound is the hiss of cold air seeping in from a crack in the walls somewhere, and begins pacing around the perimeter wall to find it. But as she approaches the shelf, her heart stops beating.

A noise, where there has been only silence for four years.

The static is not wind. As she listens in astonishment, it resolves itself from chaos into order, from random buzzing into words . . . spoken by a voice she thought she would never hear again.

_“Do you read me? Repeat.”_

Kathryn freezes, staring at the comm badge on the shelf.

_“ . . . to Captain Janeway, do you read me? This is Tuvok calling Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay. Please respond.”_

She reaches down with a trembling hand and presses the button. “Tuvok?” she whispers, as though her voice has forgotten how to form his name in her mouth, as though the past four years are a dream from which she is just now slowly waking up.

“Captain!”

Even by his measured, even, toneless Vulcan standards, there is audible relief and astonishment in his voice at the sound of hers, and Kathryn cannot stop the tears from stinging at the corners of her eyes.

“It’s good to hear your voice again, Tuvok,” she manages to choke out, “even though you disobeyed my direct orders.”

“Captain?” He sounds perplexed at this. “We anticipated you would be pleased that we managed to identify a cure for your illness. And while I confess that I did countermand your order, by making contact with the Vidiians, I find myself unable to account for how you might know that already.”

“Not that order,” she says. “I told you to get our crew home. To remain focused on the goal of finding a way back to the Alpha Quadrant. Tuvok, I’m profoundly grateful you came back for us, and found a cure as well, but to lose _four years_ of travel time backtracking to save us -”

“Four years?” Tuvok repeats. “Captain, I believe there has been a misunderstanding. You and Commander Chakotay have only been on the surface of the planet for six weeks.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head, refusing to believe it. “No. We’ve been tracking the time based on the movement of the planets and the sun. It’s been four years down here. Perhaps a little less in Earth years, but certainly more than mere weeks.”

“There was a plasma storm shortly after your arrival, was there not?” inquires Tuvok. “The Vidiians informed us that this planet experiences periodic temporal displacement, during the plasma storm season. In other words, time passes differently on the surface than it does in space. You have been absent from Voyager less than two months. The crew agreed that such a modest delay was a reasonable sacrifice in order to retrieve our captain and first officer.”

Kathryn feels the ground rock almost violently under her feet, and cannot explain why it is that it feels as though something precious has been taken away from her, even though it comes accompanied by rescue.

“We will be in orbit over the planet in approximately thirty hours,” says Tuvok, “and will prepare to transport you back then. At that time we will share everything we learned from the Vidiians about the temporal anomaly around the planet, which will likely help you and Commander Chakotay make more sense of your experience.”

“Yes,” she says dully. “Thank you, Tuvok. I’m sure it will.” This is insufficient, it sounds ungracious, so she forces herself to add more. “It will be good to see your face again,” she says, which is at least true. 

“If four years passed for you on the surface,” he says, “I expect you had resigned yourselves to the probability that we would not see each other again.”

“Yes,” she says. “We had.”

“I am very pleased that such despair was premature. The whole crew looks forward to your safe return, and Commander Chakotay’s as well.”

As if summoned by the sound of his own name, the door opens and Chakotay enters, face glowing with warmth and affection, arms full of firewood and blankets and food stores, but before he can even get a word out, he hears Tuvok’s voice.

“We will see you both again very soon, Captain.”

“Thank you, Tuvok,” she says flatly, and then the line goes dead.

Chakotay looks at Kathryn.

Kathryn looks at Chakotay.

“It’s over,” he says, in a heavy, sad voice. “Isn’t it.”

“They found a cure.”

“The Vidiians?”

“Yes.”

“So Tuvok countermanded your orders.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Still,” says Chakotay. “They would have been four years closer to home if they’d only -”

 _“Weeks,”_ she interrupts him. “There’s a temporal anomaly. Time passes differently here. It wasn’t real. None of this was real. We’ll get back to the ship and it will be like we never left, none of the rest of them will have any idea -”

He crosses the cabin in two long strides to place his hands on her shoulders. “It was real to us,” he whispers fiercely. “Nothing else matters, Kathryn. It was real to us.”

“But when we get back to the ship, it won’t be.”

“We’ll find a way,” he promises her. “We’ll find a way to make it work.”

“I love you,” she says helplessly. “I can’t un-know it now that I know.”

He wraps his arms around her. “We’ll find a way to make it work.”

* * * * *

Thirty hours later, they are back aboard the ship. They never speak of New Earth to anyone.

Kes tries, once, a few weeks after their return, when she finds Chakotay sitting alone over a cup of tea he's forgotten about for so long that it's stone cold, staring out the window at the stars. He looks so forlorn that she can't help herself.

"Four years is a long time," she begins gently. "Long enough to build a new life. Long enough for relationships to change. It would make sense if there were things you left behind down on that planet which you might miss, no matter how good it feels to be home again."

 _This isn't home anymore,_ he wants to tell her. Home was lying in bed with Kathryn and watching the snow fall outside the window as their hearts beat together and he could no longer feel where her skin ended and his own began. How can a place be home if he can't even call her by her name here?

"If you ever want to talk about it," she offers, and he knows she's only being kind, it's impossible to be cruel to Kes, but he doesn't even know where he would begin.

"We always knew this was a possibility," is all he says, and Kes nods, as though this is enough.

No one ever tries to bring it up again.

* * *

**ii. voyager**

_they say that things just cannot grow_   
_beneath the winter snow,_   
_or so I have been told_

_they say we’re buried far,_   
_just like a distant star_   
_I simply cannot hold_

_is love alive?_

They regret it every time, but they can’t seem to stop.

Each of them keeps a chronometer in their quarters, in secret, set to New Earth’s coordinates. Chakotay comes to her quarters just after midnight. “It’s the winter solstice,” he says as he enters, as though she needs to be told, as though she has been able to think of anything else all day, and his mouth is on hers the second the door closes behind him.

All the slow, exploratory tenderness of those first nights on New Earth are gone; the easy, unhurried pace of their life in that log cabin feels like another lifetime. No more leisurely mornings in bed, memorizing each other’s bodies as sunshine streamed in through the window and spilled over the double bed Chakotay carved for them.

This is their fourth solstice since leaving New Earth, and so far they have managed to keep it a secret, but it gets harder every time. Both of them have quietly arranged for the night off, and asked not to be disturbed. He has left his comm badge in his quarters, and waited until the hallways were empty before making his way to her. They have all night; but only the night. He will be gone by morning.

It is a very, very bad idea, and to their credit, both of them know this. It was a bad idea the first three times, too. It satiates nothing, eases nothing. All it does is remind them of everything they lost, everything they can never have again.

They can’t have intimacy, affection, domestic comfort, tenderness anymore. They can’t just _be_ together, for anything as simple as a shared breakfast in the mess hall, without being conscious the whole time of not giving anything away. They can’t even _look_ at each other the way they used to. All of that is gone.

But once a year - reckless and irresponsible as it is - they let themselves have this one thing.

They both have other friendships, other pastimes and hobbies and pleasures to distract them, but this is the thing they can only get from each other.

His hands are rough and hungry as they roam the pink silk of her nightgown, as his lips and tongue and breath sweep across her throat, causing her nipples to pebble beneath the delicate fabric. This new side of him will never cease to startle her - the Chakotay who was her equal, her partner, on that planet for so long that he no longer waits for her orders. The Chakotay who wants her so badly that he is willing to wait a year for the opportunity to touch her.

She can feel, through the soft fabric of his loose-fitting sleep pants, how hard he already is, and her body is already screaming _stop_ and _don’t stop_ at the same time, the way it always does when he touches her now. Kathryn Janeway is a focused, determined, disciplined woman, but this is the only area in her life where she knowingly allows herself to do something, over and over again, which she knows is incredibly dangerous and stupid.

Because tomorrow, when she watches him walk away again, to go back to his quarters and put his uniform back on and meet her on the bridge where they will act once again as though everything is fine - where they will pretend that they did not spend the night in her bed, his mouth on her skin, his hands on her breasts, his cock buried deep inside her - her heart will crack into a hundred pieces, the way it did the last time, and the time before, and she can feel it getting worse.

But she can’t let herself think about that right now, because Chakotay is pulling off his linen shirt and his warm bare chest is right there for her to caress and kiss, to bury her face in the warm sage-and-cinnamon scent of him and breathe in that instant rush of comfort only he can bring her.

“I love you,” he murmurs into her hair as her hands slip down his skin and find the waistband of his pants and tug them down. “I love you,” as he whisks the pink silk nightgown over her head and tosses it on the floor. “I love you,” as he wraps his arms around her naked back and lifts her as though she weighs nothing at all, and carries her over to the bed. “I love you,” as he climbs in beside her, and kisses his way down her body, his mouth yearning and insistent as it glides over the hollow between her breasts, down the smooth slope of her belly, and presses hungry kisses against her thighs, which part for him instinctively, without a thought.

He rests his head on the mound of her pubic bone, breathing hard, inhaling her scent, the way he always does before performing this act, like there’s something about it which is sacred to him somehow. Like he needs a moment to collect himself and remind himself that he really is permitted to touch her like this.

Her hand drifts down to stroke his hair, reassuring him as much as spurring him onward, and it gives him the courage he needs to lower his mouth to her already-slick entrance and begin.

He is always slow and methodical, here. No matter how rushed and frantic he is when he comes in the door, no matter how little time they have, no matter how hard and urgent he will be when he finally plunges inside her and their bodies crash together - here, it is always the winter solstice on New Earth. Here, with his mouth buried between her thighs, it is always unhurried and tender, aching with love and longing, as though it’s the first time all over again. When he makes her come, it is slow, and deep, and builds from the base of her spine, and when the wave finally breaks over her she shudders from head to toe, biting her lip to keep from crying out, hips lifting up and up against his mouth. But he stays here until she has come again, and then again, until she is soft and limp and sweat-sheened and trembling and whispering his name over and over again.

Only then does he climb back up to brace his body over hers and let himself enter her.

Every time, her first sensation is simply a visceral exhale of relief.

 _Oh, thank God,_ she thinks. _Thank God._

Just to feel him inside her again, to feel the delicious pressure of heat and weight and friction stretching her open, makes the whole rest of the world disappear. She knows it’s temporary, but she can’t let herself think about that right now.

It’s fierce and wild and greedy and rough. He grips her thighs so hard she’ll have bruises tomorrow. She digs her fingers so deep into his shoulderblades that if her nails were sharper they’d draw blood. It isn’t warm and gentle, the way it was on New Earth. Neither of them have ever thought of themselves as the kind of person who needs it like this - who wants it like this - but with a year of tension building up between them each time, the act of releasing it is almost savage in its brutality.

“Harder,” she whispers, burying her mouth in his throat, teeth scraping against his skin. “More, I need more . . . please . . .”

 _“Fuck,_ Kathryn,” he moans into her skin, and the word makes her shiver, as it always does. Chakotay is a man who is careful about words, and she has only ever heard him use that one when he’s doing this, with her, when the composed and wise and steady man at her right hand falls apart in her bed because he is completely undone by the force of his own want.

The first round is brief and explosive; she has to bite the corner of her pillow, he has to muffle his cries against her shoulder, to keep from being overheard. Once the immediate animal need has been slaked, they can catch their breath a little, and though a second round - or a third - are risky, it grows harder and harder for them to let go of each other.

Tonight, she bathes his warm, sweat-sheened skin with her lips and tongue until he’s shaking, moaning her name, and she can see that his spent cock is stirring back to life again. Then she pulls him up to a seated position and climbs into his lap, legs wrapped around his hips, and caresses his cock until it’s ready for her to lower herself down upon it. She’s still soaked, so he slides into her in one long, smooth thrust, leaving them both shuddering. He cradles her face in his hands, eyes dark and intense on hers, and there are so many things to say, but neither of them wants to open any of those locked doors right now, neither of them wants to waste precious breath on talking, so he doesn’t say anything.

But he doesn’t have to, not really. She can read it all in his eyes. The heartbreak tangled up with the pleasure, the excruciating misery of getting what you want when you know you’ll have to give it all back up again tomorrow.

 _Complicated,_ he had called it. _Devastating,_ she had said in reply.

And she was right.

“I love you,” she whispers, tears stinging her eyes, as they move together, his arms wrapped around her back, holding her close, and she _hates_ it, she _hates_ this, that she can’t fall asleep in those arms every night and wake up in them every morning, she hates that when she sees him tomorrow for breakfast in the mess hall she won’t be able to just lean down and kiss him the way she did every day on New Earth during those four years that didn’t exist for anybody else.

“I love you,” he whispers back, and she can see that he’s crying too.

* * * * *

They sleep, a little, maybe an hour or two, partly because they aren’t as young as they used to be and have worn their bodies out; and partly because of how much they miss all the small, simple intimacies like this which they took for granted on New Earth and now can never have again.

The third round is reckless and stupid and very nearly gets them caught. But they can’t help themselves; as she rises from the bed and pulls her nightgown back on, to walk him to the door, and he retrieves his loose linen pants and shirt from the floor to dress himself, he turns back to give her one last look, and she can’t stop herself from rushing up to him and kissing him again. And soon they’re kissing with the kind of frantic, uncontrollable heat they arrived with, and then they’re kissing up against the wall, and then suddenly with a few tugs of fabric he’s inside her again, hard and fast and rough, pinned against the bulkhead of her quarters as she clutches desperately at his linen shirt to keep her balance. They come together, fierce and fast and almost violent, and then it's over, and they both feel even lonelier than before.

“Kathryn, I don’t know how much longer I can keep going like this,” he whispers as their shuddering bodies return back to earth, nightclothes and hair now impossibly disheveled. “It gets harder and harder to walk away from you every time.”

“Should we . . . stop?” she asks in a low voice. “Would it be easier if there was nothing? If we put it all behind us, tried to see other people?”

“Is that what you want?”

“What I want is to be able to live two lives at once,” she says helplessly. “I love this ship and this crew, Chakotay. I’m not sorry we have our family back. But every day, I wish . . .”

She trails off.

“You warned me,” he says heavily. "You told me that if we let something grow down there, something it would be too difficult to part with if we ever had to leave, that it might break us. And you were right.”

“It won’t be like this forever,” she says, with more confidence than she feels. “When we get back to the Alpha Quadrant -”

“It could take us decades to get back to the Alpha Quadrant,” he says. “And anything could happen to either one of us between now and then.”

“I know,” she says. “I know, Chakotay. But I don’t know what else to do.”

He wraps his arms around her. “I love you,” he whispers, pressing a kiss into her hair. “As painful as this is, it still feels good to be able to say that to you. After holding it in, for all that time.”

“I love you too,” she says back, reaching up to caress his cheek. “Even when I can’t say it to you, I’m always thinking it.”

He smiles down at her sadly, straightens his pants and shirt, and then in moments, he’s gone.

* * * * *

There’s a brief scare with a pair of security officers who very nearly see him, but don’t, and he manages to make it back to his quarters without incident, where he lies awake staring up at the ceiling for the rest of the night until his alarm pings him to wake up and dress for his shift.

When he sees her again, she’s drinking coffee in the mess hall, Neelix hovering at her side in one of his ongoing attempts to force a more substantial breakfast on her; she looks tired this morning, he points out, and a little sad, and that might mean she isn’t getting enough protein, but a Jiballian seven-spice omelette should perk her right up.

“And one for you too, Commander,” he says brightly to Chakotay. “You don’t look like you got much sleep last night either.”

“No,” says Chakotay, without looking at the captain. “I can’t say that I did.”

“Well, as chief morale officer,” says Neelix over his shoulder, as he returns to the galley, “if there’s anything you need to get off your chest, you always know where to find me. Goodness knows we can’t have our captain and first officer both under the weather at the same time! Too many people depending on both of you.”

“Yes,” says the captain quietly, staring down into her coffee. “There certainly are.”

“A difficult life, leading a starship crew like this,” says Neelix cheerfully. “What a good thing you have each other.”

Then he’s distracted by the sizzle of Eskarian eggs in a piping-hot skillet, and doesn’t notice that neither the captain nor Chakotay say anything, or look at each other, for the rest of the meal.

* * *

**iii. indiana**

_I still believe in summer days_   
_the seasons always change_   
_and life will find a way_

_I'll be your harvester of light_   
_and send it out tonight_   
_so we can start again_

The Admiral has two weeks of leave, and she uses it the same way she always does.

She returns home to Bloomington for the winter solstice.

Funny, how when she was younger she ached to get out of Indiana. She would walk through the fields and look up at the stars and imagine herself anywhere but here. So many worlds out there she knew only from classroom study - Vulcan, Betazed, Bajor, Q’onos - and so many more waiting to be discovered. Bloomington was the world’s least interesting place to her, then. She wanted to be anywhere else but here.

But after seven years lost in the farthest reaches of space, suddenly its rolling prairies and infinite blue skies have become home to her again.

San Francisco is, for most of the year, where she lives - in a spacious, well-kept apartment suitable for Starfleet brass - but "home" is a word whose meaning is now particular and specific, to this place only. The apartment is just an apartment; but there is something about the permanence of a house on real land - where you can open a door and step out and feel soil beneath your feet, instead of the climate-controlled halls of a spaceship - which feels like a profound luxury. The house is not large, a mere two stories on a few acres of land (an Admiral's salary is better than a captain's, but still), though she does not mind. After three years back on Earth, there has been ample time to make it more than comfortable. Every item has been chosen with care, from the blankets draped across the armchairs by the fireplace, to the carpets on the floor. No replicated household goods here. She wants everything in the house to feel as real as the building itself.

She wants to be surrounded by things made by human hands. Things which have ties to the earth. Things that will remind her she has put down roots in this place, and is no longer flying through the stars.

The Starfleet shuttle which drops her off at her front door transports all her luggage directly upstairs into the master closet, but at her request, as always, opens the hatch so she can get out and walk the rest of the way up the drive. She prefers to cross the threshold of her home herself, on her own two feet. She has become old-fashioned, that way. The snow on the ground is already at least six inches, and there will be more overnight, but she doesn’t mind crunching through the glittering white surface along the stone path leading to the front door. Her boots are good, and the distance isn't far.

(Snow, another childhood inconvenience of Indiana living, which somehow accrued unexpected new emotional weight while she was gone.)

She steps inside the empty, waiting house, scrapes the snow off the soles of her boots and leaves them by the door, and begins her homecoming ritual, wandering from silent room to silent room, reorienting herself. She only comes here a few times a year, though one day when she retires it will be the home where she goes to bed every night and wakes up every morning, a pleasant future to look forward to. But for now, it feels like only good manners to reintroduce herself, allow the house to get used to her again.

She passes through the dining room, caressing the sleek dark wood of the table and chairs, small enough not to overwhelm the space but large enough to have guests for dinner occasionally. In the living room, she grazes delicate fingertips over the stone mantle, where seven years of cherished items collected from Voyager’s travels now have pride of place. Upstairs, she rests her palm on the cool marble surface of the vast sunken bathtub, where she will make herself at home again tonight, after dinner.

She admires the neat dovetail joists at the corners of every room, where logs hewn by hand are stacked together so cleanly that the icy winter wind feels a whole universe away.

Her tour ends, as it always does, in the bedroom, high-ceilinged and airy in a way no one would ever expect a log cabin to be. She runs her hands over the magnificent, hand-carved wooden bed, its headboard etched with an intricate design of delicate falling snowflakes - each one different from the next - then sits down on top of the thick, hand-stitched quilt to wait.

It does not take long. After only a few minutes, she can see from the bedroom window a dark shape moving across the vast rolling expanse of white snow, leaving a trail of footprints behind him, and she smiles.

A moment later, she hears the back door below her open and close, followed by the sound of footsteps on tile, the rough grating hiss of snow being scraped off the soles of boots, the thick muffled fabric sounds of a man taking off a very heavy coat and hanging it up, and then finally, finally, the soft pat of bare feet ascending the wooden stairs.

The man who built this house for her - and everything in it - enters the bedroom they share, and his face lights up at the sight of her.

"Your shuttle was early," he says, playfully accusing. "I was out in the fields checking on the honeybees and the winter vegetables. I didn't think I would miss you."

"You didn't," Kathryn says to her husband, rising from the bed to put her arms around his neck and pull his head down to hers for a kiss. "I'm right here.”

* * * * *

It’s always frantic and urgent, the first time, when they haven’t seen each other in a few weeks, and her hands move almost immediately to the buttons of his shirt, greedy for the feeling of his skin against hers again. She hasn't been home since October; Chakotay was working on the kitchen then, hanging new open shelves for the ever-growing supply of dried herbs and spices from the garden he's been tending for the last two years. He isn't a city person, and never has been, but even Kathryn was surprised at how easily he adapted to life in Indiana, the rural rhythms that have barely changed in centuries. He's made friends with all their neighbors by now, and every time she comes home there's a new surprise waiting for her - a greenhouse he’s retrofitted with climate controls for citrus trees, a carved rocking chair by the fireplace he made himself. He visits her in San Francisco whenever she has free time (easy, with regular transporter access), but he doesn't live in that apartment.

The apartment belongs to Admiral Janeway. Chakotay only wants to live someplace he can call her Kathryn.

So he travels back and forth, to visit when he can, and in the meantime, he devotes himself to their home - to the place they will live together, for the rest of their lives, when this phase of her career is over. He carves birds and flowers into the wooden banister and sources exotic mosaic tiles from Risa for the bathroom floors and teaches himself about the soil composition of Indiana, so when she comes home he can serve her food made with things he has grown himself.

The first time he built a home for her, she didn’t understand what it meant while it was happening; she did not know, yet, that laying stone and carving timber were the truest ways he knew how to tell her he loved her. Now, she knows what it means, and she takes it all as a gift, and gives him back the only thing he has ever wanted from her in return.

“I missed you,” she whispers as they tug clumsily at each other’s clothes until everything is tossed in a heap on the floor and they can finally fall into bed. “I love you.”

The words always seem to undo him, like they’re a surprise every time.

“I love you,” he answers her back, voice hoarse and rough with desire, and then it’s happening, he’s inside her, there’s no time to waste, it’s been too long, and they're ravenous for each other. They fell in love on a lonely planet with no company but each other, and nothing to stop them from doing this every night (and most mornings, and sometimes even afternoons), and grew used to the intimacy of sharing a bed, holding each other, touching each other, casual kisses over breakfast, long baths together to unwind from a long hard day. Then they were torn away from that world, back to rules and order and the Starfleet chain of command, back to guarding every expression because there were always people watching them, and the most they could allow themselves was one night a year, which felt unspeakably cruel. But once they returned to Earth, Chakotay retiring from active duty in order to remove the only obstacle to their relationship felt like the most natural thing in the world.

So now they are used to it again, and the three weeks since Chakotay's last visit - a longer interval than usual, but the Admiral has just returned from a diplomatic mission - feel like an eternity to be apart.

But it's over now, she's here, they have two uninterrupted weeks, and tonight is Earth's winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and they have nothing to do but lie in bed as the snow falls outside the window of the home Chakotay built. And unlike their home on New Earth, this one really will be forever.

His arms are warm and strong as he holds her small body close against his, rising and falling above her, and she wonders for the thousandth time how it could have taken her so long to see it - that her quiet dependence on him, the way her whole body feels more steady and grounded any time he walks into a room, the thrilling vulnerability when he shares parts of himself with her, all these things are love. She has loved him as long as he has loved her; only he understood it first, and gave it a name. But from the moment he set foot on her ship, neither of them were whole without the other. They know this now. They are older, and wiser, and they have suffered, and lost much, and found it again, and know better than to take for granted the simple pleasure of falling asleep with another heartbeat next to your own.

She arches her back and cries out as he moves inside her. (Another blessing of their vast swathe of property, no neighbors to hear them if they’re loud in bed.) "Kathryn," he breathes into her skin, trailing a row of soft kisses up the delicate tendon of her throat. "Oh God, Kathryn."

She does not think she will ever get tired of the way he says her name. As though the word itself is sacred, and the permission to speak it a gift.

Their bodies collide over and over, hard and powerful and demanding as waves breaking over a rocky shore, and Kathryn feels the shivery-sweet thrill of listening to his sounds change, from soft, low moans to something hoarser, rougher, more desperate. She likes that after all this time, she can still make him lose control. Her fingers dig into the smooth golden flesh of his back as her hips lift to meet his, and as she comes for the first time she can feel him shudder against her, following her over the brink with such force that he brings her with him a second time.

Afterwards, they lie there together for a long, long time, catching their breath, letting the sweat cool from their overheated skin, feeling their bodies melt together. "I'm glad you're finally home," he murmurs into her hair, as she curls up against his strong chest, and lets herself be held, in the one place in the whole universe where she can be simply Kathryn and not Admiral Janeway.

"Home is wherever you are," she tells him.

Outside, the Indiana snow falls thicker and thicker, gusts of sparkling white tumbling down outside the bedroom window. Kathryn doesn't even notice. Inside his arms - in the bed he built, in the home he built, surrounded by the proof of his love for her - she is safe, and warm, and happy.


End file.
